The Scrapbook
by arcessita
Summary: A collection of moments in the relationship of Severus Snape and Hermione Granger. Complete, at least as much as it's going to be.
1. A Forward, by the author

**The Scrapbook**

Disclaimer: To my eternal annoyance, I am not being paid to write fanfiction. If I were, I would quit my job, drop out of school, and spend the next twenty years breeding plotbunnies. Er, anyway. JKR owns the characters and the settings you recognize, and well as what's "really" going to happen. She's very kindly allowed loons like me to play with them, and We Praise Her For It. I seem to recall that the movie people have some sort of rights, too, so genuflections to them as well.

Chapter Description: A Forward, By the Author

* * *

A forward.

My grandmother has a collection of scrapbooks. There are two or three binders for each of her six children, plus some for herself and her husband. These scrapbooks are lined up along an old church pew in the attic bedroom my sister and I shared when we went to visit. There are pictures, and pamphlets from school, and letters, and crayon drawings. A thoughtful letter home from my father during his first year of college lies opposite a picture of him studying on the same bed I lay on to look at it. My great-grandfather's obituary is a few pages away from a first day of school picture of my father and his siblings.

I got to thinking about these scrapbooks one night---how we try to collect the memories that show how we got from here to there. There's no set thematic, no overarching mood; it's just a series of moments that we tried to capture, moments that helped us define who we are. I've slipped into the first person plural---my grandmother is not the only one who tries to collect her own history this way.

At the beginning of one of my classes this semester, we read Raymond Queneau's _Exercises in Style_, and a piece of this scrapbook puzzle fell into place. If style is to some extent imposed and artificial, then perhaps this ragtag collection of memories can employ it to tell each moment in its own way. I can tell I'm meandering off into the theoretical, so I'd better come back to my point before I confuse myself.

In the chapters that follow, I'm going to be experimenting with style a great deal. Each moment I describe will be true to itself, and will hint at thge greater story of which it is a part. If I were a Victorian novelist instead of a twenty-first century college student taking a postmodernism class, I would write you a frame story about how a Ministry of Magic employee in the late twenty-first century was looking through the archives and came across a set of scrapbooks from the estate of the late Mr and Mrs Snape. Except that a Victorian novelist would never have read Harry Potter. If it would make you happy to imagine such a frame story, please feel free.

Getting back to style, though, my way of telling this story does owe a lot to the Victorian novel---Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ is an excellent example of using a collection of letters and journal entries to tell a story---but like any good writer of the postmodern, I'm not going to give it to you straight. I'm going to tell you this story out of order, I'm going to mix my persons and tenses, I'm going to give you screenplays, comics, letters, and epiphanies. Well, some may call it postmodern. I'm inclined to call it lazy.

In the continuing theme of postmodernism---or laziness, whichever you prefer---I will be updating as ideas come to me, not on any regular schedule. I suspect the frequency will wax and wane depending on how busy I am---ideas being more prevalent, of course, when I have two midterms, a paper, and a job interview in the next week. I will be tagging each scene with a date, to keep it from being too confusing where in the chronology I'm writing from.

That's all the advisory I think this thing needs. Welcome to the Scrapbook, and I do hope you enjoy yourselves.

Oh, and remember, nothing is more postmodern than that which is self-conciously postmodern!

---

A brief disclaimer: Though I absolutely enjoy making fun of postmodernism, I should clarify that it's the popular use of 'postmodern' as a buzzword that I think is a bit stupid. Actual works of postmodernism--such as the Queneau I mentioned earlier--are wonderfully complex examinations of things we take for granted. I mean them no harm, and wholeheartedly admit that my work could never in a million years stand up to theirs. In much the same way I'm playing in JKR's backyard, I'm playing in the backyards of those people who made postmodernism cool.

If you're interested in postmodernism in general, here's the reading list for my class: Raymond Queneau, _Exercises in Style_. Vladimir Nabokov, _Lolita_. Anthony Burgess, _A Clockwork Orange_. Tom Stoppard, _Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_. Jorge Luis Borges, _Collected Fictions_. Italo Calvino, _If on a Winter's Night a Traveler_. Angela Carter, _The Bloody Chamber_. Salamn Rushdie, _The Moor's Last Sigh_. Martin Amis, _Time's Arrow_. I don't have the bulkpack on me, but there's also some papers and short stories as well. And my personal favorite (though not required for the class), is Larry Wall's talk "Perl, the first postmodern computer language", which is available at: http:\\www.wall.org\~larry\pm.html (slashes are backwards to prevent ff.net losing the link)


	2. August 27, 2003 Hogwarts

**The Scrapbook**

Disclaimer: To my eternal annoyance, I am not being paid to write fanfiction. If I were, I would quit my job, drop out of school, and spend the next twenty years breeding plotbunnies. Er, anyway. JKR owns the characters and the settings you recognize, and well as what's "really" going to happen. She's very kindly allowed loons like me to play with them, and We Praise Her For It. I seem to recall that the movie people have some sort of rights, too, so genuflections to them as well.

Chapter Description: Entry #1

* * *

August 27, 2003. Hogwarts.

Buried in the fifth or sixth box I found a bedraggled old teddy bear. It looked like it might have had an animating charm on it at one point, but now it just blinked its beady little eyes pleadingly at me.

"Look what I found!" I said, waving it at Severus.

In the early days he would have blown a capillary or two, and maybe hexed me for my trouble, but as it was he just glared at me and kept sorting.

"You know," I said conversationally, "I used to give my toys really pretentious names---comes from my parents; look at what they named me---I had a pink rabbit named Beatrix, and a llama named Ophelia, and a big stuffed St Bernard I called Lenore. I named my dolls after characters from Greek mythology. I thought my cousins were _so_ stupid for naming theirs what was on the box."

He ignored me, so I kept talking.

"I guess my earliest choices were a little different. I got a free Bassett hound toy when I got my first pair of Hush Puppy sandles, and I named him Froot Loop for some inexplicable reason."

Master strategist that I was, I fell silent when he started to look interested. We worked in silence a few more minutes.

"Systematically," he said finally.

"What?"

"I named my toys systematically. You have, um, Little Little Bearie."

He blushed. He actually blushed.

It was so cute I just had to kiss him, and then he... well, we didn't finish going through those boxes.

I got the whole story out of him a couple of hourse later, when we were snuggled up and he was feeling a bit less embarrassed by the whole thing. Turns out he really did name them systematically---I had to stifle my laughter when he told me the larger of his two flying dragons (scales and all) was called "Big Bird", and then I had to soothe his injured pride, which was fun in an entirely different way.

I felt bad when I found out why he only had the one left---I know some things can seem unforgivable at the time, but I pray I never do something like that if we decide to have children---but he seems to have forgiven me my clumsy banging around his psyche. After all, he is letting me help with the sorting again tomorrow.

And so I lay next to him, watching him sleep, and I think about how he was probably always a control freak, and anal-retentive, and so _utterly_ a scientist. And you know what? I think he's just wonderful.


	3. April 18, 1980 Hogwarts

**The Scrapbook**

**Chapter 3**

Disclaimer: To my eternal annoyance, I am not being paid to write fanfiction. If I were, I would quit my job, drop out of school, and spend the next twenty years breeding plotbunnies. Er, anyway. JKR owns the characters and the settings you recognize, and well as what's "really" going to happen. She's very kindly allowed loons like me to play with them, and We Praise Her For It. I seem to recall that the movie people have some sort of rights, too, so genuflections to them as well.

Chapter Description: Entry #2

* * *

April 18, 1980, Hogwarts.

From the journal of Severus Snape.

Today has been quite possibly the longest day of my life. It didn't start out all that badly---Esserman managed a Shrinking Solution that did not explode, smoke up the classroom, or crawl out of the cauldron to terrorize his classmates. The sevenths were properly respectful today, which is fortunate for Gryffindor. It has taken, at last count, four hundred and thirty-eight house points to convince them that Sirius Black is not to be mentioned in my class. Bastard.

I am calm now. I am calm.

It went downhill from there. The Headmaster came by after lunch to request that I please not call the first-years "brainless little shit-lickers." He suggests "dunderheads," with a thinly veiled threat that further profanity will result in my promotion to the decorations committee. For the next twenty years.

Dunderheads. Somehow it doesn't have the same ring.

The afternoon was much more tedious with the headmaster's ban on my language. I try to look on the bright side: I will be forced to insult them more creatively, increasing their terror, which is always a good thing, and the loss of my more colorful vocabulary will make it slightly less obvious that my father was a coal miner from Yorkshire. However, the added strain is only increasing my temper. I think I'm developing a tic in my left eye.

Must remember to pick up more willow bark when I'm next in Hogsmeade.

Then there was Miss Mott. My brief conversation with her---possibly the longest ten minutes I have ever experienced---will be burned into my memory as long as I live. 

I had office hours tonight from six to eight. I've managed to frighten most of the students away from them, leaving me with a few private hours to read, but there persists of steady trickle of students---Miss Mott among them---who insist upon arriving each night to ask me pointless questions.

She came in, at precisely seven, and proceeded to stare at me with a confused expression on her face.

"Say something or get out, Miss Mott," I said impatiently.

She blushed and looked at her hands. "I have a confession to make, Professor," she mumbled.

My tic came back as I envisioned my classroom covered in black goo.

"I...um...I really like you."

My jaw did not drop open, but it was a close thing.

"That's...ah, that's why I haven't been doing well in class lately. It's not that I'm not studying or not paying attention, or, well, I guess it is that I'm not paying attention because I'm watching you, but I'm not stupid and I really work hard but..."

When had this happened? Half my brain was saying, "What the hell am I supposed to do about this?" and the other half was asking, "Does she have to be in Hufflepuff?" There was also a small part doing a victory dance.

I realized she had stopped speaking and was staring at me with wide eyes. At that moment, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, Hufflepuff or no.

"Uh," was about all I could manage.

"I know you're my teacher, but I've been...watching you, since my fourth year. I even talked to you, right before you left school, not that you'd remember, but..."

She had? It took me a few minutes, but I remembered her---a little blond girl, saying she'd miss me and looking nervously back at a group of giggling girls several meters away before running off. At the time, I had thought it was a prank or a dare---go talk to the big ugly dark wizard---but this new information made it, well, gratifying.

I was thinking she had truly lovely eyelashes when something occurred to me.

"Why are you telling me this?"

She stopped, mid-ramble, and stared at me. A few tense seconds ticked by, during which I noticed that her eyes were actually rather close together. It gave her the vague impression of stupidity.

"I...I hoped you would understand," she said finally. She looked down at her hands, twisting them. "I want to become a mediwitch, but I don't have the marks for it, and..."

She now closely resembled Mad-Eye Moody.

"You wanted me to tutor you? Extra credit, perhaps?" I was starting to get very angry. "Did you not hear what I said on the first day of class? There are no extra projects. There are no special cases. _Get out of my office, Miss Mott!_"

She squeaked, and ran. The door slammed shut behind her.

With my luck, the Dark Lord will call tonight. Bastard.


End file.
